Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  By severe oppression under Trajan and Hadrian, the prohibition of circumcision, and the desecration of Jerusalem by the idolatry of the pagans, the Jews were provoked to a new and powerful insurrection (A.D. 132–135). A pseudo-Messiah, Bar-Cochba (son of the stars, Num. 24:17), afterwards called Bar-Cosiba (son of falsehood), put himself at the head of the rebels, and caused all the Christians who would not join him to be most cruelly murdered. But the false prophet was defeated by Hadrian’s general in 135, more than half a million of Jews were slaughtered after a desperate resistance, immense numbers sold into slavery, 985 villages and 50 fortresses levelled to the ground, nearly all Palestine laid waste, Jerusalem again destroyed, and a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, erected on its ruins, with an image of Jupiter and a temple of Venus. The coins of Aelia Capitolina bear the images of Jupiter Capitolinus, Bacchus, Serapis, Astarte. Thus the native soil of the venerable religion of the Old Testament was ploughed up, and idolatry planted on it. The Jews were forbidden to visit the holy spot of their former metropolis upon pain of death.18 Only on the anniversary of the destruction were they allowed to behold and bewail it from a distance. The prohibition was continued under Christian emperors to their disgrace. Julian the Apostate, from hatred of the Christians, allowed and encouraged them to rebuild the temple, but in vain. Jerome, who spent the rest of his life in monastic retirement at Bethlehem (d. 419), informs us in pathetic words that in his day old Jewish men and women, "in corporibus et in habitu suo iram a Domini demonstrantes," had to buy from the Roman watch the privilege of weeping and lamenting over the ruins from mount Olivet in sight of the cross, "ut qui quondam emerant sanguinem Christi, emant lacrymas suas, et ne fletus quidem i eis gratuitus sit."19 The same sad privilege the Jews now enjoy under Turkish rule, not only once a year, but every Friday beneath the very walls of the Temple, now replaced by the Mosque of Omar.20 The Talmud.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  They walked together, and the world smiled to see it! They embraced on the street, and strangers were glad! While all the time I lived pale as a worm, cast out from pleasure, from comfort and ease.I rose from the bath, all heedless of the spilling water, and took up the photograph again; but this time I crushed it. I gave a cry, I paced the floor: but it was not with wretchedness that I paced, it was as if to try out new limbs, to feel my whole self shift and snap and tingle with life. I hauled open the window of my room, and leaned out into the dark - into the never-quite-dark of the London night, with its sounds and its scents that, for so long, I had been shut from. I thought, I will go out into the world again; I will go back into the city - they have kept me from it long enough!But oh! how terrible it was, making my way into the streets next morning - how busy I found them, how dirty and crowded and dazzling and loud! I had lived for a year and a half in London, and called it my own. But when I walked in it before, it was with Kitty or Walter; often, indeed, we had not walked at all, but taken carriages and cabs. Now, for all that I had borrowed a hat and a jacket of Mary’s to make me seemly, I felt as though I might as well be stumbling through Clerkenwell in no clothes at all. Part of it was my nervous fear that I would turn a corner and see a face I knew, a face to remind me of my old life, or - worst of all - Kitty’s face, tilted and smiling as she walked on Walter’s arm. This fear made me falter and flinch, and so I was jostled worse than ever, and had curses thrown at me. The curses seemed as sharp as nettle-stings, and set me trembling.Then again, I was stared at and called after - and twice or thrice seized and stroked and pinched - by men. This, too, had not happened in my old life; perhaps, indeed, if I had had a baby or a bundle on me now, and was walking purposefully or with my gaze fixed low, they might have let me pass untroubled. But, as I have said, I walked fitfully, blinking at the traffic about me; and such a girl, I suppose, is a kind of invitation to sport and dalliance ...The stares and the strokings affected me like the curses: they made me shake. I returned to Mrs Best’s and turned the key in my door; then I lay upon my rancid mattress and shivered and wept. I had thought myself brilliant with new life and promise, but the streets that I thought would welcome me had only cast me back into my former misery.

• From Wild (2012)

  I didn’t wait for an answer. I ran to my mother’s room, my brother right behind me. When I opened the door, Eddie stood and came for us with his arms outstretched, but I swerved away and dove for my mom. Her arms lay waxen at her sides, yellow and white and black and blue, the needles and tubes removed. Her eyes were covered by two surgical gloves packed with ice, their fat fingers lolling clownishly across her face. When I grabbed her, the gloves slid off. Bouncing onto the bed, then onto the floor. I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal. She’d been dead an hour. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an island of warm. I pressed my face into the warmth and howled some more. I dreamed of her incessantly. In the dreams I was always with her when she died. It was me who would kill her. Again and again and again. She commanded me to do it, and each time I would get down on my knees and cry, begging her not to make me, but she would not relent, and each time, like a good daughter, I ultimately complied. I tied her to a tree in our front yard and poured gasoline over her head, then lit her on fire. I made her run down the dirt road that passed by the house we’d built and then ran her over with my truck. I dragged her body, caught on a jagged piece of metal underneath, until it came loose, and then I put my truck in reverse and ran her over again. I took a miniature baseball bat and beat her to death with it, slow and hard and sad. I forced her into a hole I’d dug and kicked dirt and stones on top of her and buried her alive. These dreams were not surreal. They took place in plain, ordinary light. They were the documentary films of my subconscious and felt as real to me as life. My truck was really my truck; our front yard was our actual front yard; the miniature baseball bat sat in our closet among the umbrellas. I didn’t wake from these dreams crying. I woke shrieking. Paul grabbed me and held me until I was quiet. He wetted a washcloth with cool water and put it over my face. But those wet washcloths couldn’t wash the dreams of my mother away. Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But, not in the same way. I knew it never would be, I didn’t mind. The fact is, she had a man-friend, who wished to marry her. But she wouldn’t do it, she believed in the free union. Nance, she was the strongest-minded woman I ever knew!’She sounded, I thought, insufferable; but I had not missed that was. I swallowed, and Florence gazed once at me, then looked again at the fire.‘A few months after I first met her,’ she went on, ‘I began to see that she was not - quite well. One day she turned up here with a suitcase. She was to have a baby, had lost her rooms because of it, and the man - who turned out hopeless, after all - was too ashamed to take her. She had nowhere... Of course, we took her in. Ralph didn’t mind, he loved her almost as much as I did. We planned to live together, and raise the baby as our own. I was glad - I was glad! - that the man had thrown her over, that the landlady had cast her out...’She gave a grimace, then scraped with a nail at a piece of ash that had come floating from the fire and had fallen on her skirt. ‘Those were, I think, the happiest months of all my life. Having Lilian here, it was like — I cannot say what it was like. It was dazzling; I was dazzled with happiness. She changed the house - really changed it, I mean, not just its spirit. She had us strip the walls, and paint them. She made that rug.’ She nodded to the gaudy rug before the fire - the one I had thought woven, in a blither moment, by some sightless Scottish shepherd - and I quickly took my feet from it. ‘It didn’t matter that we weren’t lovers; we were so close - closer than sisters. We slept upstairs, together. We read together. She taught me things. That picture, of Eleanor Marx’ - she nodded to the little photograph — ‘that was hers. Eleanor Marx was her great heroine, I used to say she favoured her; I don’t have a photograph of Lily. That book, of Whitman‘s, that was hers too. The passage you read out, it always makes me think of me and her. She said that we were comrades - if women may be comrades.’ Her lips had grown dry, and she passed her tongue across them. ‘If women may be comrades,’ she said again, ‘I was hers...’She grew silent.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  And he’d closed off with “Love from your best Daddy.” That made my eyes tear up, the best Daddy part, like a whole slew of others were lined up to daddy in my direction. Plus another thing niggled at me: I wasn’t entirely sure Daddy knew about Hector. It had gotten harder to write stuff without mentioning him. Maybe we were supposed to fake in letters that Mother was moping around lonesome like one of those countrysong divorcées. I had the good sense, of course, not to write about old bowlegged Ray rubbing on Mother’s nude back. But between not mentioning Hector and not knowing whether to sound cheerful or like I was suffering without Daddy, writing him got harder. I spent a lot of time staring around the Christian Science Reading Room. Or I’d try to chew my tooth pattern into the yellow paint of my pencil so the marks lay exactly even all the way down. Sometimes a whole morning slid out from under me in that musty room with not a “t” crossed nor an “i” dotted on my Big Chief tablet. That Father’s Day Lecia and I crossed from the stable to the pay phone booth at the Esso, which was hot as blue blazes from taking in early sun. Unfolding the glass door let loose a blast of hot air like an oven. The silver floor was crusty, littered with wasps and moths that must have just dropped mid-flight from heat and lack of oxygen. I stood in the doorway so as not to smush them on my shoe bottoms. But Lecia just crunched right over them to the coin slot and dropped in her dime. The black receiver got held an inch or so off her cheek, to keep from scalding her, I guess. She told the operator to dial a collect call to Woodlawn 2-2800. After it rang about a zillion times with no answer, the operator broke the connection. On her next try, the switchboard lady at the Gulf wouldn’t accept charges or put her through to Daddy’s unit. Lecia said in her most quavery voice that it was a medical emergency, then she called the woman a nasty-assed bitch and slammed the phone down so hard it bounced right out of its little silver catch and spun from the cable, whapping the phonebooth glass. Lecia busted into tears after that. She buckled up like something broke inside her, sliding to the bottom of the phone booth without even checking the coin return for change. We wound up making two Father’s Day cards from blue construction paper. We put “Dad” in cursive on front of both using sky-blue glitter and Elmer’s glue. I went with a flag motif on mine, adding red stripes in crayon. The silver stars I drew went a dull, gunmetal gray instead of looking sparkly like the Crayola itself did. Staring at the end product rankled me.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Pain: complaint, suffering, sorrow David starts by expressing his pain and feelings of abandonment: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest. verses 1–2 You might recognize that first line. Jesus quoted it on the cross. Actually, much of this psalm parallels Jesus’ suffering on the cross, and all four gospels refer back to it when describing His crucifixion. Both David and Jesus expressed their pain honestly. They didn’t try to put on some spiritual mask, pretending things were okay. They cried out. They expressed their emotions. The best prayers are real prayers. They aren’t eloquent, but they are heartfelt. They aren’t polished, but they are transparent. They aren’t theological masterpieces, but they touch the heart of God. Dear God, like, really? Dear God, are you serious? Dear God, where in the world are you? Dear God, I’m done. I’m at the end of my rope. God isn’t scandalized by that level of honesty. He won’t get His feelings hurt over it. That is exactly how the psalmist prayed, time after time. God already knows our hearts, so why not be transparent with Him? We can tell Him that we feel alone, betrayed, abandoned, afraid, angry, disappointed, confused, or hurt. Maybe you’ve been told that is disrespectful, but God calls it honest. 2. Processing: struggling with the contradictions David doesn’t stay in that dark place, though. He processes his feelings by turning to God. He starts by saying this: Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the one Israel praises. In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame. verses 3–5 What is David doing? He is remembering God’s works in the past. He is reminding himself that God has always been faithful, and He won’t stop now. Part of processing our pain is to ground our present circumstances in the bigger picture. Pain has a way of shouting so urgently that we think the entire sky is falling. But maybe it’s just a small piece of it. Or an acorn. The only way to know is to spend some time reflecting on who God is, what He has done for us, how great He is, and where we fit in His plan. After that moment of light, though, things grow dark again. David poetically laments how powerless he feels. It’s like the clouds of doubt cleared for a moment, then closed in on him again.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Grief is its own form of prayer. It might have words, it might not. It might be expressed toward God, or it might simply be the overflow of a broken heart. God cares about our grief. He sees it and hears it, and He weeps with us. David wrote, “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). God doesn’t wait for an invitation to draw close. Like a parent hearing the cry of a hurt child, He comes to us in our time of need. That is good because prayer can be difficult in times of grief. We might feel like God himself is to blame for our suffering, that He let us down instead of saving us. We can be so overwhelmed that we are hardly able to put words together. We often come to know God best in grief. The distractions and superficial things fade away, and we are left with the knowledge that God is real, and He is with us, and He cares. Nothing else makes sense, and we can’t even explain what we know about God. All we know is that His presence and peace fill our hearts, fill the room, fill our day. If you are going through something difficult and don’t feel like praying, that’s okay. Don’t put yourself under pressure to act spiritual or pretend to have faith. Your grief is a prayer, and your sorrow is a cry to God. Just let Him love you. Let Him bring you peace and comfort. It’s what He does best. PRAYER IS REST A third way that prayer puts us into the mystery of God is by bringing us to a place of rest. That might seem odd at first because “not knowing” seems like it should produce unease and anxiety, not rest. When we embrace the mystery of God, though, we discover the rest that comes from simply letting Him be God. Have you ever watched a movie with someone who can’t handle not knowing what is about to happen? Maybe it’s one of those movies where the screenwriter purposefully makes things confusing, and the loose ends don’t get tied up until the end. But your friend can’t appreciate that artistic choice, so they pepper you with questions throughout the movie. As if you know any better than they do about what is going on. Finally, you snarl semi-seriously, “Just be quiet and enjoy the movie. It’ll make sense later, I promise.”

• From Wild (2012)

  When I said all the things I had to say, we both fell onto the floor and sobbed. The next day, Paul moved out. Slowly we told our friends that we were splitting up. We hoped we could work it out, we said. We were not necessarily going to get divorced. First, they were in disbelief—we’d seemed so happy, they all said. Next, they were mad—not at us, but at me. One of my dearest friends took the photograph of me she kept in a frame, ripped it in half, and mailed it to me. Another made out with Paul. When I was hurt and jealous about this, I was told by another friend that this was exactly what I deserved: a taste of my own medicine. I couldn’t rightfully disagree, but still my heart was broken. I lay alone on our futon feeling myself almost levitate from pain. Three months into our separation, we were still in a torturous limbo. I wanted neither to get back together with Paul nor to get divorced. I wanted to be two people so I could do both. Paul was dating a smattering of women, but I was suddenly celibate. Now that I’d smashed up my marriage over sex, sex was the furthest thing from my mind. “You need to get the hell out of Minneapolis,” said my friend Lisa during one of our late-night heartbreak conversations. “Come visit me in Portland,” she said. Within the week, I quit my waitressing job, loaded up my truck, and drove west, traveling the same route I’d take exactly one year later on my way to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. By the time I reached Montana, I knew I’d done the right thing—the wide green land visible for miles outside my windshield, the sky going on even farther. The city of Portland flickered beyond, out of sight. It would be my luscious escape, if only for a brief time. There, I’d leave my troubles behind, I thought. Instead, I only found more.

• From Wild (2012)

  The last couple of days of her life, my mother was not so much high as down under. She was on a morphine drip by then, a clear bag of liquid flowing slowly down a tube that was taped to her wrist. When she woke, she’d say, “Oh, oh.” Or she’d let out a sad gulp of air. She’d look at me, and there would be a flash of love. Other times she’d roll back into sleep as if I were not there. Sometimes when my mother woke she did not know where she was. She demanded an enchilada and then some applesauce. She believed that all the animals she’d ever loved were in the room with her—and there had been a lot. She’d say, “That horse darn near stepped on me,” and look around for it accusingly, or her hands would move to stroke an invisible cat that lay at her hip. During this time I wanted my mother to say to me that I had been the best daughter in the world. I did not want to want this, but I did, inexplicably, as if I had a great fever that could be cooled only by those words. I went so far as to ask her directly, “Have I been the best daughter in the world?” She said yes, I had, of course. But this was not enough. I wanted those words to knit together in my mother’s mind and for them to be delivered, fresh, to me. I was ravenous for love. [image file=image_rsrc2VM.jpg] My mother died fast but not all of a sudden. A slow-burning fire when flames disappear to smoke and then smoke to air. She didn’t have time to get skinny. She was altered but still fleshy when she died, the body of a woman among the living. She had her hair too, brown and brittle and frayed from being in bed for weeks. From the room where she died I could see the great Lake Superior out her window. The biggest lake in the world, and the coldest too. To see it, I had to work. I pressed my face sideways, hard, against the glass, and I’d catch a slice of it going on forever into the horizon. “A room with a view!” my mother exclaimed, though she was too weak to rise and see the lake herself. And then more quietly she said: “All of my life I’ve waited for a room with a view.” She wanted to die sitting up, so I took all the pillows I could get my hands on and made a backrest for her. I wanted to take her from the hospital and prop her in a field of yarrow to die. I covered her with a quilt that I had brought from home, one she’d sewn herself out of pieces of our old clothing. “Get that out of here,” she growled savagely, and then kicked her legs like a swimmer to make it go away.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He hesitated ; I kicked at his ankle with my foot until he stepped away.‘You are not yourself, Nan -’‘Get out!’‘I am afraid to leave you -’‘Get out!’He flinched. ‘I shall go beyond the door - no further.’ Then he looked at Kitty, and when she nodded he left, closing the door behind him very gently.There was a silence, broken only by the sound of my ragged breathing, and Kitty’s gentle weeping: just so had I seen my sister weep, three days before. Nothing that Kitty ever did was good! she had said. I placed my cheek upon the counterpane where it covered Kitty’s thighs, and closed my eyes.‘You made me think he was your friend,’ I said. ‘And then you made me think he didn’t care for you, because of us.’‘I didn’t know what else to do. He was only my friend; and then, and then-’‘To think of you and him - for all that time -’‘It wasn’t what you think, before last night.’‘I don’t believe you.’‘Oh Nan, it’s true, I swear! Before last night - how could there have been anything? - before last night, there was only talk and - kisses.’Before last night ... Before last night I had been glad, beloved, content, secure: before last night I had known myself so full of love and desire I thought I should die of it! At Kitty’s words I saw that the pain of my love was not a tenth, not a hundredth, not a thousandth part of the pain I should suffer, at her hands, now.I opened my eyes. Kitty herself looked ill and frightened. I said, ‘And the - kisses: when did they start?’ But even as I asked it, I guessed the answer: ‘That night, at Deacon’s ...’She hesitated - then nodded; and I saw it all again, and understood it all: the awkwardness, the silences, the letters. I had pitied Walter - pitied him! When all the time it had been I who was the fool; when all the time they had been meeting, whispering together, caressing ...The thought was a torment to me. Walter was our friend - mine, as well as hers. I knew he loved her, but - he seemed so old, so uncle-ish, still. Could she ever, really, have brought herself to want to lie with him? It was as if I had caught her in bed with my own father!I began, once more, to weep. ‘How could you?’ I said through my tears: I sounded like a stage husband in some penny gaff. ‘How could you?’ Beneath the blankets I felt her squirm.‘I didn’t like to do it!’ she said miserably. ‘At times I could hardly bear it -’‘I thought you loved me! You said that you loved me!’‘I do love you!

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I looked at her, and at Cyril — at his flushed and sleeping face, with its delicate lashes and its jutting pink lip. I said, with a kind of creeping dread: ‘And then ... ?’She blinked. ‘And then - well, then she died. She was too slight, the confinement was a hard one; and she died. We couldn’t even find a midwife who would see to her, because she was unmarried - in the end we had to bring a woman in from Islington, someone who didn’t know us, and say that she was Ralph’s wife. The woman called her “Mrs Banner” - imagine that! She was good enough, I suppose, but rather strict. She wouldn’t let us in the room with her; we had to sit down here and listen to the cries, Ralph wringing his hands and weeping all the while. I thought, “Let the baby die, oh, let the baby die, so long as she is safe... !”‘But Cyril did not die, as you see, and Lilian herself seemed well enough, only tired, and the midwife said to let her sleep. We did so - and, when I went to her a little later, I found that she’d begun to bleed. By then, of course, the midwife had gone. Ralph ran for a doctor - but she couldn’t be saved. Her dear, good, generous heart bled quite away -’Her voice failed. I moved to her and squatted beside her, and touched my knuckles to her sleeve; and she acknowledged me kindly, with a slight, distracted smile.‘I wish I’d known,’ I said quietly; inwardly, however, it was as if I had myself by the throat, and was banging my own head against the parlour wall. How could I have been so foolish as not to have guessed it all? There had been the business of the birthday - the anniversary, I realised now, of Lilian’s death. There had been Florence’s strange depressions; her tiredness, her crossness, her brother’s gentle forbearance, her friends’ concern.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I still remember the counselor’s name. Dr. Akudagawa. I remember how I had to stay with friends of my parents when the three of them abandoned me for sessions. How my father never went into the basement. How she rarely came up. How my sister got closer and closer to the final act of leaving for college: exeunt daughter, stage left. How my father’s rage came to live in the house for good. How I would be what was left of her, when she gave me a piece of her hair as a keepsake. How my father’s eyes would turn. This is Not About my Sister THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT MY SISTER. BUT IF IT WERE, I’d tell you again that for two years before she could leave our Oedipal household she carried razor blades in her purse. I’d tell you how her colon was irrevocably messed up - how as a child I sat in the bathroom with her and held her hand every time she tried to poo. How she squeezed my little girl hand so tight I thought it might be crushed. Because it hurt that bad to shit. I’d tell you how she was born with a wandering eye, and what the Dr. who later delivered me wrote about what that might mean for infants like her - how to watch for it as a sign of danger in a child. How fathers or uncles or grandfathers might have had a hand in this particular kind of eye disorder - in certain sexual abuse cases - a penis coming too close to the still developing eyes of a child. I’d tell you how, in the end, my sister replaced my mother and father in my mind and heart, how we created a union of survival that means we are both still alive. If this book were about my sister, I’d tell you how she lived past daughter. And I’d show you a picture. A Simca station wagon. Maybe white. Maybe wood paneling. My father loved the Northwest. He loved to explore the mountains and rivers and lakes. He loved to fish and camp and hike. But his wife had a misshapen leg not good for walking and he had two daughters instead of sons, so his disappointment always came with us everywhere we went. We could never hike far enough. Never carry enough weight. Never go as deeply into the wilderness. We couldn’t fish right. We had to pee sitting down and we needed toilet paper. A crippled wife and two daughters. We couldn’t even breathe right. Ever. The Christmas I was four and my sister was 12 we drove and drove. From I-5 to Puyallup. Past Enumclaw. East on highway 7 to Elbe. Onto Highway 706 east through Ashford to Alexander’s. Then there is the entrance to Mt. Rainier National Park. I have driven it many times as an adult. That’s how I remember the path. Or so I tell myself.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology. Like in dreams. So if I am thinking of a memory of a relationship, or one about riding a bike, or about my love for literature and art, or when I first touched my lips to alcohol, or how much I adored my sister, or the day my father first touched me - there is no linear sense. Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory - but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear. AFTER THE STILLBIRTH, the words “born dead” lived in me for months and months. To the people around me I just looked … more sad than anyone could bear. People don’t know how to be when grief enters a house. She came with me everywhere, like a daughter. No one was any good at being near us. They’d accidentally say stupid things to me, like “I’m sure you’ll have another soon,” or they would talk to me looking slightly over my head. Anything to avoid the sadness of my skin. One morning my sister heard me sobbing in the shower. She pulled the curtain back, looked at me holding my empty gutted belly, and stepped inside to embrace me. Fully clothed. We stayed like that for about 20 minutes I think. Possibly the most tender thing anyone has ever done for me in my entire life. I WAS BORN cesarean. Because one of my mother’s legs was six inches shorter than the other, her hips were tilted. Gravely. Doctors told her she could not have children. I don’t know whether to admire the ferocity of her will for deciding to have my sister and me, or to wonder what kind of woman would risk killing her own infants - heads crushed by the tilted pelvis - before they could be born. My mother never believed she was “crippled.” My mother brought my sister and me into the world of my father. When the conventional doctors voiced their medical concerns to my mother, she went to another kind of doctor. An obstetrician/gynecologist who practiced alternative approaches to health. Dr. David Cheek was best known for his work using hypnosis on patients using their fingers to tell him the subconscious causes of emotional or physical illness. The process is called “ideomotor.” Particular fingers are designated (by the doctor or the patient) “yes,” “no,” and “don’t want to answer.” When the doctor asks the hypnotized patient questions the relevant finger lifts in response - even when the patient consciously thinks otherwise, or has no conscious awareness of the answer.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  YOU CAN TELL A LOT ABOUT A PERSON FROM SEEING them in the water. Some people freak out and spaz their way around like giant insects, others slide in like seals, turn over, dive down, effortlessly. Some people kind of tread water with big goofy smiles, others look slightly broken-armed and broken-legged or as if they are in some kind of serious pain. I swam, once, with Ken Kesey. In a man-made reservoir up near Fall Creek. Puffy with drink, his bulk rounded and bulged around his former reputation. It was night swimming. Five people, I think. Totally, completely, unapologetically, rocket shot high. The moon kept coming in and out of focus as the clouds moved around. And the water was warm yet, so it must have been late summer, but in my mind it has the crisp clarity of fall for some reason. If it had been fall we would have frozen our tits off. So sometime in late summer less than a decade before he died, we entered the waters. Man-made reservoirs smell like dirt and concrete mixed with algae. I dove down into the black and opened my eyes. Looking into lake water at night is like looking into deep space while drunk. Black, and blurry. I resurfaced and strong-armed into a glide, went down, came up again, then took a look back, and saw his unmistakable head and burled broad shoulders. “Goddamn girl, what are you, some kind of mermaid?” he said. Spitting a stream of water. Yeah. In the black reservoir water we swam around each other looking at the sky, treading water, floating on our backs and letting our feet break the surface. Sometimes Kesey’s belly rose up like an island. We shot the shit, mostly he told stories … That’s a bald faced lie. Just now I made it sound like we casually shot the shit out there, but really my brain was as numb as a wad of cotton and I couldn’t think of anything interesting to say, so I just let him talk and I don’t even remember what he said because my head was expanding and contracting like an idiot’s. And he wasn’t really in the water with me. He was on the shore. But then he must have said something from somewhere that penetrated, because I opened my mouth, and it was nothing nothing nothing words until it wasn’t nothing anymore, and I was listing all the horrible things people had said to me since my baby died. Things like: “You know, it’s probably better that she died before you got to know her.” Or: “ Well what you really want in your 20s is the freedom to party.” Or my personal favorite, from my father’s sister, fascist catholic: “The saddest part is that she’ll go to hell, isn’t it, since she wasn’t baptized.”

• From Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  The first time, againDating and intimacy after the death of your spouse might feel like a betrayal. You need time to recover and grieve for your loved one before starting a new relationship. After years of making love with one person, you might find you are out of practice when it comes to having sex with a new man. Share your feelings with him—he is probably as nervous as you are. Practice safe sex, even if there is no risk of pregnancy. [image file=image_rsrc3DX.jpg] Sex files: Sex after sixtyRemaining sexually active in later life is a great way to stay emotionally and romantically bonded with your partner. It also keeps you feeling young, sexy, and vibrant. This is how one couple revived their sex life, despite health problems and a belief that people over the age of 60 “don’t have sex.” [image file=image_rsrc3DY.jpg] Background Martin, 60 years old, and Victoria, 62 years old, have been married for 11 years. They have a close relationship and have supported each other through illness—Martin has diabetes and back problems, and Victoria had breast cancer, which she has just recently recovered from. The problem Victoria’s sex drive waned considerably after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and didn’t return when she got better. This, plus the fact that they both had busy lives helping out with grandchildren, meant they hadn’t had sex in almost three years. Despite an otherwise happy relationship, Martin and Victoria were growing irritable and impatient with each other. Martin was keen to resume his sex life with Victoria, although he said he sometimes found it difficult to maintain an erection. Victoria’s response to Martin’s request for sex was, “I’m over 60. Who has sex in their 60s?” Finding solutions After assuring Victoria and Martin that many people have active sex lives well into their 60s, 70s, and beyond, I recommended that they make physical health a priority. This included healthy eating (which is of special importance for Martin because he has diabetes), daily exercise, and regular check-ups with their doctors. I reminded them that the more frequently people have sex, the more they want and enjoy it, and the more their bodies respond sexually. Next, I proposed a five-step plan to help them rebuild their sex life. The first step was to restore intimacy (and counteract impatience and irritability) by bringing back neglected tokens of affection: I asked them to use pet names for each other, buy each other little gifts, and cuddle and kiss. The second step was for Victoria to start giving herself “me” time. I wanted her to stop focusing exclusively on her grandchildren so that she could get out of her “grandma” mindset and rediscover herself as a woman. To help this process I asked her to buy a simple, no-frills clitoral vibrator to re-awaken her sexual responses.

• From Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  If neither of you is up to making love during this time, keep your bond strong by maintaining touch and intimacy. If you don’t maintain some affection, the lack of physical contact may create a lack of emotional intimacy as well. Take baths together, give each other back rubs, or just lie in the spoons position in bed. Sometimes just having a good cry can help keep your relationship strong—and give you both emotional catharsis. If you are having trouble caring for yourself, then having another person to take care of you can make all the difference to your recovery time. Sex during the healing processGrief, like any serious illness, needs to run its course. It can take several years to come to terms with grief, particularly if a bereavement occurs in tragic or untimely circumstances. However, most people recover, and naturally and gradually accept their loss with time. For those who become stuck in a grief cycle, it can help to see a trained therapist. A therapist will not only help you come to terms with your loss but can help you stay emotionally open with your partner—this will make it easier for you to stay sexually intimate. Sex during times of angerMost couples have fights and disagreements. It doesn’t mean they can’t work through their problems, but anger can have a damaging effect on a couple’s sex life. Pinpointing the causes of anger in a relationship isn’t always easy. Sometimes we confuse anger with other emotions, such as frustration, hurt, or sadness. You might discover the reason you thought you were angry had nothing to do with the real reasons. For example, you might think you are angry with your partner for not spending enough time with you, but the real reason for your anger may be a change in your career or other circumstances that have caused you to spend more time alone. Discovering the reason for tension and anger in a relationship is always the first step in resolution. If neither of you is willing to make a truce, then agree not to be intimate during this time. Anger is not good for your nervous system or for your relationship, so agree to disagree for the time being. If arguments and disputes are ongoing, consider seeing a couples’ therapist, who can help you both work through your conflict. However, if you are both willing to stay intimate through times of conflict, try experimenting sexually—use new positions and techniques to break out of your previous relationship script. Sex and intimacy can help you to stay connected during a rocky patch. A close, sexual bond can also help to heal your relationship. All couples get angry, but if you make him sleep on the couch, you might be setting yourself up for a longer fight.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Year 10 we drink on top of Harvey’s Casino we drink in the elevator we drink instead of fucking until we can’t see or hear or feel we drink even on the way to the airport in the cab we get to the airport I go to the ticket counter to go back to Oregon but I know I’m not going to get to go back to anything just Oregon I turn around with the tickets he’s asleep against the wall snoring like drunks do all our luggage around him like children we never had I leave the ticket in his drunk sleeping hand he’s pissed himself I can’t take care of this man. Year 10 he sleeps with one of our mutual students she emails me and tells me she is a good person she emails me and tells me he is a good person she emails me and tells me I am a good person they fuck and fuck I come home from work she is on the black leather couch passed out he is passed out on the floor. Year 10 you said you would love me until I died you said we would die together in love you said when I was 75 we’d laugh our saggy skinned laughs and drink to our old ass love you said it to me you did every year until you stopped saying it where are you where is the man who would love a woman like me there are no men if not you there never were any men for me not even a father I stop eating lose 25 pounds everyone says everyone says you look so beautiful. Like a movie actress. Isn’t she beautiful?

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  It took six months. The rest of her life. One of the more difficult parts of her hospitalization was her intense withdrawal from alcohol. You will hate my saying this, but it will be true nonetheless. If I hadn’t had Miles, I would have moved back into her house of pain. And I would have brought her a bottle to ease her suffering, her journey. Every day if that’s what it took. But my Miles - there was a deathmother, and there was his life. That is all. When she died I was not with her. I tried to help her during her illness but she had so clusterfucked her life up by then there was almost nothing I could do. Andy and I flew to Florida to see her. To comfort her. To show her Miles. She looked so happy to see the little baby boy with the lifeforce larger than thunderstorm. She said, “Belle, take him - I don’t remember how to hold a baby right.” She said, “A boyah! We’ve never had one a those!” Clapping her hands together and crying. But she had almost no life left in her. Once when I was alone with her in her hospital room, I asked her a question. She looked so small and still. Her face was shrunken and wrinkled, and her body so pale and slight. She almost looked like a girl, except for the lines a sad cartography across her face. I asked her, “What’s the best thing that’s ever happened in your life?” It was the question Kesey had asked me. It’s what I could think to ask. She said, “Oh. Well, Belle. That’s easy. My children.” Though I couldn’t imagine how, I believed her. They called me from a Florida Hospice all the way in Oregon when her skin became ashen and her eyelids began to flutter. They put the phone to her ear. She could not speak, as she had starved herself and hadn’t the energy by then. They said when she heard my voice on the other end her eyes became very wide, and then her breathing became very loud and urgent. Then the nurse took the phone back and told me she was gone, and that she looked peaceful, and that she believed my mother had heard me.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience-bring words close to the body-as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry. Poetic language - and by that I mean the language of image, sound, rhythm, color, sensation-is probably the closest we bring language to experience - poetic language takes you to the edge of sense and deep into sensation. So after I name my primal grief, the death of my daughter the day she was born, it felt precise to move directly to poetic language. The metaphor of collecting rocks is more “true” to me to the experience of grieving than to say, I was intolerably sad. It feels precise to draw that metaphor of collecting rocks out, to extend it as long as possible, to let the reader feel the space of grief in the house the way I did. It’s my hope that at least one person will find resonance in that extended language space. I want you to hear how it feels to be me inside a sentence. Even if some of the sentences seem to lose their meaning. I want the rhythm, the image, the cry to remain with your body. You could probably go through this book and literally chart the moments of emotional intensity by watching where the language - to quote Dickinson-goes strange. You have published both fiction and nonfiction. Can you talk about your experience with both genres as well as the role memory plays? While I was writing this book, many things occurred to me about both memory and about the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. About memory, after my father drowned and lost his wits - specifically his short-term and a good bit of his long-term memory, I became rather obsessively interested in how memory works at the level of neuroscience and biochemistry. I was trying to deal with the fact that the things he’d done had been “erased” from experience. Part of me didn’t believe it-I’d look at him and think, is the dark side of him still in there? Tucked deeply behind the gray matter?

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  Complex PTSD is sometimes called Disorder of Extreme Stress. "As adults, these individuals often are diagnosed with depressive disorders, personality disorders, or dissociative disorders. Treatment often takes much longer than with regular PTSD, may progress at a much slower rate, and requires a sensitive and structured treatment program delivered by a trauma specialist."7 We agree with Herman: "naming the syndrome of complex posttraumatic stress disorder represents an essential step toward granting those who have endured prolonged exploitation a measure of the recognition they deserve. It is an attempt to find a language that is at once faithful to the traditions of accurate psychological observation and to the moral demands of traumatized people. It is an attempt to learn from survivors, who understand, more profoundly than any investigator, the effects of captivity."8 There is much we can learn from listening to and understanding the experiences of cult survivors. The Role of the Belief System in RecoveryThrough cult recruitment and indoctrination, a person's core beliefs are dramatically changed. In some groups, fear tactics and traumatic events (sometimes called "tests") are deliberately used and even accepted by devotees as necessary for spiritual and psychological growth. Naturally, if a person was born or raised in a group, the cult-shaped belief system and behaviors may be all she ever knew. (See Part Three.) Cult members are consistently taught that all good comes from the group or leader while everything negative is the member's fault. Such beliefs increase the confusion following trauma, making it difficult to determine who is responsible or who is rightly to blame. Thus, cult-induced trauma creates an unusually intense load of guilt and blame that may not occur in other trauma survivors. Following traumatic events, many people either change their memories or change their interpretation of the event to fit their beliefs; this is called assimilation. Conversely, they may change their beliefs about the world and the traumatic event; this is called accommodation. All of us engage in this kind of refraining to some degree when we must make sense of horrific events in order to survive. It happens rather automatically-for example, memories get altered unconsciously. But trauma survivors may alter their interpretation of the event so that they blame themselves or even forget aspects of the trauma.' The following example from a Vietnam veteran illustrates how refraining works to perpetuate traumatic aftereffects: Doug T., in treatment for PTSD in a Veterans Administration facility, was a Marine squad leader in Vietnam. His unit of twenty-nine men was ordered to patrol in an area known for enemy activity. Ambushed, almost all were killed or wounded, including his best friend. For more than thirty-five years, Doug believed he was totally responsible for the ambush and the casualties that followed. He had nightmares and intrusive thoughts, was burdened with tremendous guilt, and was severely depressed.